The original title of Jonathan Swift’s novel was the rather unwieldy Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, Then a Captain of Several Ships.
Swift initially published the novel, a thinly veiled attack on the King of England and the politics, culture and religion of the day, without his name attached.
Gulliver’s original travels took him not only to Liliput, but also to Brobdingnag, Laputa, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, Japan and Houyhnhnm Land.
Teen Twilight heartthrob Taylor Lautner was originally cast as the movie’s Liliputian commoner, Horatio. But producers dropped him after he struck them as too young for the role, which then went to TV’s How I Met Your Mother star Jason Segel.
Newspaper stories displayed underneath the end credits feature accounts of some of literary Gulliver’s additional travels not depicted in the movie, such as his encounter with the vile, savage “Yahoos.”
American frontiersman Daniel Boone was fond of quoting from Swift’s novel, and once claimed in one of his “tall tales” to have killed a hairy giant he called “a yahoo.”
